


Swan Song

by Ranni



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Angst, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Dark Science, Gen, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, I can't believe that's a tag but it delights me, Injury, Medical Procedures, Mind Manipulation, Mindfuck, Minor Violence, Protective Clint Barton, Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:15:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21925792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranni/pseuds/Ranni
Summary: He is as much a prisoner as they are. He’s pitiable and pathetic, but he’s also their captors’ puppet, their trustee, their Stockholm-Syndromed lackey.He’s a Mindfucker of the highest degree and the only reason Captain America and Hawkeye didn't escape ages ago.He’s the reason they may die here.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Avengers Team, Clint Barton & Steve Rogers, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Avengers Team
Comments: 93
Kudos: 142





	1. Chapter 1

*

Clint makes a point to avoid courtroom television dramas because they’re boring and he _hates_ them, but he still knows enough to guess at what’s expected.

“I object!”

“On what grounds, counselor?” The judge has a limp combover and half-spectacles. He frowns at Clint, both in character and in subtle warning. _This better be good_.

“Such facts are spurious to the case, as plainly outlined in _Hill v Romanov_.”

He and Steve are getting good with all this constant practice, throwing in all the legal jargon tangentially absorbed from movies, television, and books. All that matters is that they make a good show of things, even if nothing they say really makes any sense.

“Sustained.” There’s no more rhyme or reason to the rulings than there is substance to the arguments; it’s all flash and show, a pantomime of real court proceedings.

Steve, at the opposing table, sighs and leans in to consult with his client. Sometimes that client has Thor’s glorious head of hair. Sometimes he’s dressed in one of Phil Coulson’s best suits. Today he has Tony’s eyes, peering out from behind Bruce’s glasses.

Clint doesn’t look at him.

*

The guards come and take Steve away.

Hours later they return him pale and oddly quiet, Calvin holding his elbow solicitously. They never move Steve without bringing the Mindfucker along too, because even a sick, staggering Steve is still strong, and their captors are right to worry what he’s capable of.

Clint stands in his own cell and pretends to watch Steve, but he’s really eyeing the guard’s guns, cataloguing who’s got, how everything is holstered. Noting how tall everyone is, guessing at how much they weigh. From what he can tell the cells have standard locking mechanisms, and the outer door is operated with a simple keycard.

It’s a little insulting, actually, to be thwarted by a bunch of rent-a-cops and a series of shitty doors.

But then again, Project Prometheus doesn’t need to waste money on unbreakable doors when they have a Mindfucker on their side.

*

The hospital scenes aren’t overly gory—Calvin is ridiculously squeamish, shying away from excessive blood and grisly details—but just dramatic enough to keep Clint actively engaged.

What’s more, he can _see_ here. The world is bright and clear instead of filmy and hazy, and as much as he hates being forced through someone else’s machinations, Clint can’t help but feel a little giddy with the relief of it all.

“Get me the epi, stat!”

“There’s no time!” Clint pushes Steve roughly aside because it’s _his_ turn to be the headstrong but brilliant rookie doctor, thank you very much. He looks at the screaming monitor, flashing a series of numbers that don’t seem to correspond to anything. The machine isn’t even plugged into the wall; small details are not the Mindfucker’s forte. “God, we’re losing him!”

Steve gives him a sour look, as if considering jockeying for the position of medical hero just for the hell of it, but he’s still a little subdued from whatever they’ve done to him. “It’s no use, Doctor. He’s gone.”

“No! He has a strong heart; he wants to live!” Clint knows what comes next; he’s seen it a hundred times on television and in movies, and pounds the patient once in the heart. He glances at the monitor, waiting for the telltale blip of life, but none comes. Clint suppresses a sigh. “Don’t you die on me, you bastard! Don’t you dare!”

“You have too much to live for!” Hit. “Think of your wife!” Another hit. “Your children!”

Maybe he hits a little harder than necessary, because while the Mindfucker is technically every non-Steve, non-Clint person in the room, he’s most present in the role of the dying patient. He always makes himself the star of the show. Clint raises his fist dramatically again, almost clipping the nurse standing near his elbow, and falters. Her face is unfamiliar, but her red hair and arrow necklace are unmistakable.

And, just like that, the joy from the reprieve from prison life vanishes. All of it ruined by that bit of Natasha, plucked out of Clint’s brain by a Mindfucker and inserted here just to torture him, just to make what was temporarily fun a little bit worse.

Clint lowers his hand, ignoring the machine's one-note, flatlined _eeeeee_. He takes in the obnoxiously white surroundings, the patient and nurse with their anonymous faces, the machines not plugged into anything, the conspicuous lack of blood, and doesn’t feel like playing anymore.

“This isn't real.”

The _eeeeee_ sound stops abruptly.

"This is _bullshit_."

“No, wait. Don’t give up,” Steve tries, and throws him a pleading look that turns to one of warning, then back to pleading. _Play along, Barton_. “You were right before; we can bring him back. Get the epi,” he barks at the nurse, and as good as Steve can be, he can’t salvage the moment, and the nurse just stands there lifelessly, a marionette with cut strings.

Clint leans in close to the patient. “You didn’t make it. You died. You fucker. _Mind_ fucker.”

There’s a long beat of silence, then a blip, then a _beepbeepbeep_ , and then the patient takes a dramatic breath of life.

*

They leave the technicolor world of the hospital and snap back to the reality of metal walls and harsh fluorescent lighting, to biting cold floors and the smell of unwashed bodies.

Clint instinctively reaches for Steve, but Steve is too far away and Clint ends up raking his hand through a tray of food that the guards must have left while they were dreaming away. Mashed potatoes and some sort of slimy meat product smear across the floor while the tray and utensils clang noisily, and a small, bewildered _huh_ of surprise escapes Clint’s mouth before he can stop it.

He holds up his hands, deliberately not thinking of how close they need to be to focus on properly. This has become his routine—every time they wake he examines his fingernails to see if they’re longer, leans up on an elbow to peer into the other cell, to try to determine if Steve’s beard has grown in.

Here in the real world time is perfectly normal, measurable in minutes and hours and days, but in the dreamworlds things can last however long the Mindfucker wants them to. He’s dragged Steve and Clint through his favorite mental dramas—the teaching hospital, the prairie homestead, the American suburban family, and the endless, _endless_ courtroom procedurals—and they seem to last hours or days or even weeks, only for everyone to blink awake in the real world mere minutes later. It’s impossible to reconcile to the imbalance of timelines, unsettling for Clint to realize that his brain is aging faster than his body.

But from the look of things they haven’t been gone very long this time. The stubble on Steve’s face isn’t any longer than it was. The food on the floor is warm. Clint’s eyes haven’t gotten any better.

“Calvin,” Steve says. “Calvin, listen to me.”

Clint returns to his back and stares up at the ceiling—the blurry ceiling, the alarmingly hazy ceiling—a hand still covered with mashed potatoes riding the rise and fall of his chest up and down. He’s listening, even if the Mindfucker isn’t.

“Thank you for that. That was a nice break for all of us. And you made it really exciting, like you always do.”

Steve does that so well. That Captain America voice, infinitely reasonable, with notes of _Let’s work this out_ and _We’re all this together_ , underlaid with the promise of _I’ll take care of everything._ Clint fell hook, line, and sinker for that voice in the beginning. Sometimes he still falls for it when the chips are down, because Steve is easy to believe in, because he’s so goddamned inspiring, because he does it all _so_ well.

“But, Calvin, we need to get out of here. And I know we can make it if the three of us work together.”

His cellmate doesn’t answer; he isn’t much of a talker. He has a broken, stuttering voice of unsubstantial volume, and Clint doesn’t know if that’s a result of whatever they’ve done to him here, or the way he was born. Calvin is as much a prisoner as they are, and he’s pathetic and pitiable but he’s also their captors’ puppet, their trustee, their Stockholm-Syndromed lackey.

He’s a Mindfucker of the highest degree and the only reason Captain America and Hawkeye didn't escape ages ago.

He’s the reason they’re going to die here.

*

It’s what Clint has always thought of as a Football Family—the dad that goes to work and comes home to watch football, the mom who makes cookies for high school football fundraisers, kids that play on the team or cheer for the team. A perfect family. A TV family.

His fake wife, Georgia, looks disconcertingly like Natasha, and his fake son far too much like an eleven year old Barney Barton. Clint’s eyes skitter uncomfortably over them as they slog through every chipper family dinner, grits his teeth through the wholesome evenings of board games that invariably follow. At long last they arrive at the end of the day, and Clint tells his fake kids goodnight and is just about to beat a hasty retreat to the relative safety of the living room when a tiny voice wavers, “Daddy?”

And what had started as yet another unremarkable nightly run-through of the Barton Football Family has teetered into something important, because the Mindfucker is here.

More specifically the Mindfucker is _there_ , in a tiny bed, wearing a Disney princess nightgown and a little girl’s face. Calvin usually prefers to pal around with and keep his primary focus on the far more affable Steve, leaving Clint—the escape artist, the squeaky wheel, the fly in the ointment—on the fringes of the dreamworld to interact with the less developed, tertiary characters. His fake daughter’s face, indistinct and amorphous a few moments ago, has suddenly sharpened into something with intelligence and personality. There’s light behind her eyes. Out there, in the real world, Calvin is as prisoner as much as Steve and Clint—starving and filthy and freezing—but in here he’s whoever he wants to be, whenever he wants to be them. And right now he’s Clint’s daughter.

“Yes, uh, honey?”

There are suddenly big tears in big eyes and a trembling lower lip. “Sally Jensen was making fun of me the other day. Because of my teeth. Because you can’t afford to buy me braces.”

It’s bullshit; the two kids have always had perfect smiles of every perfect Football Family; their teeth practically big white fucking Chicklets. But if Calvin has decided that the daughter needs to be bullied then that's the way it is. Previously lovely Maggie suddenly has the worst overbite in all of human history and Clint’s formerly bountiful salary will not be enough to cover a set of braces. All of this will happen because there’s nothing Calvin loves more than a good angsty subplot—the running theme through all his mundane hellscapes.

“Well, sweetie, you tell those kids to—” _go fuck themselves_ is his first impulse, but it’s a rare opportunity to talk directly to Calvin, and Clint can’t screw it up, no matter how tired and frustrated “—leave you alone,” he finishes rather lamely. He’s never been good at talking to kids, even when he’d been one himself. “You’re beautiful just the way you are.”

And that’s right, that’s just right. That’s what Steve would say, Steve, who plays all these parts so very well. Clint's fake daughter grins up at him with her ugly little teeth, and he makes himself kiss her forehead, steadfastly ignoring the idea that he's kissing a Mindfucker. He plods downstairs at long last to the sanctuary that is the living room, where Georgia sits curled up on the couch. She looks too much like Natasha and, like Maggie, is suddenly more substantial than usual, because now _she’s_ the Mindfucker.

“Was Maggie still upset?” she asks worriedly. “She asked me about the braces, but, gosh, money’s just so tight right now.” She has tears in her eyes, and that’s wrong. Natasha would never cry about something as ridiculous as teeth or over some minor playground bullying. Georgia’s face goes uncertain for a moment, and the tears abruptly disappear.

"That's better," Clint says, before he can stop himself.

*

The next time it’s Clint’s turn.

“Are you okay?” Steve keeps asking. “Can you hear me? Are you alright?”

The answer to that question changes depending on who’s asking. Bruce is invariably given versions of _I’m fine, calm down,_ and _don’t worry_. For Tony it’s all about joking, deflection, and making light of things; Clint would weave Tony a long story of anal probing worthy of the filthiest issue of Penthouse Letters. Natasha would be offered only the truth, because after ten years together they can sniff out one another’s lies quick as anything.

But this is Steve. Steve needs to hear that everything’s okay. That Clint’s hurting, sure, but still strong, and can still fight when the time comes.

And Clint will tell Steve all those things in a minute. Maybe in _two_ minutes—he just needs a bit of time to bring himself all the way back. He’d made himself go away a little while the doctors were working and coming out of it is a process, one that takes even longer when something’s hurting. And right now his eyes are screaming, the eyelids rimmed red, raw and probably bleeding. Every blink is a painful exercise, so he keeps his eyes closed, and that makes it harder to make his mouth work and answer Steve, who’s now starting to panic a little.

“Can you hear me? What happened? Clint? _Clint_. Are you okay? Clint?”

He sounds scared, and it’s only Clint’s long held and sincere belief that Captain America should never sound scared that allows him to finally produce a raspy “Yeah. I’m fine.”

The first words are always the hardest. Like gears grinding. A sluggish engine, slow to warm. With the first lie out of the way the others will come easier, more readily.

“What happened?” 

Steve won’t let Clint to get away with the stiff upper lip and _It doesn’t matter, it’s over_ answer that he invariably gives when asked the same question. Steve never talks about what they do to him, probably out of kindness, having no idea that it’s actually worse for Clint’s vivid imagination to supply the visuals instead. Project Prometheus is all about acquiring knowledge. They just want to _know_ —and that means leeching the superserum out of Steve’s blood and bones, peeling Clint’s eyeballs apart layer by layer to determine what makes them special. They may not want to kill Steve and Clint, but death is seeming more and more like an inevitable side effect.

“ _Barton_. Talk to me. What happened?”

Clint manages to unfold himself from the floor and up onto his knees, and he doesn’t reach out to steady himself on the floor—though he wants to, he _needs_ to, he’s swaying so hard that a faceplant is almost a fucking certainty—and turns toward Steve. He’s glad he’s at the other end of his cell, glad they’re not face to face, glad he can’t see his own ruined eyes reflected in Steve’s wide ones, the lids rimmed in blue and black, irises floating like two gray marbles in a red pool.

The Mindfucker stays in the corner of the cell he shares with Steve, watching them. He doesn’t look sorry. He doesn’t look happy. He doesn’t look anything.

*

He’s at the beach. It’s not a happy beach, a sunny beach; just a cloudy, endless beach. There are no people. Too-tall waves and a restless, angry ocean. Clint has walked this beach a dozen different times, walked it for hours and days and has never come to the end. It goes on forever, because this is Calvin’s version of time-out, a Mindfucker’s punishment for some imagined transgression. And there are so many possible transgressions: Clint not playing along adequately, Clint not showing proper gratitude for a particularly vibrant scenario, Clint trying to escape.

Needless to say, Clint’s spent a lot of time here.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” the Mindfucker says.

He looks like Phil Coulson, which isn’t fair. And maybe it also isn’t fair to hate Calvin for borrowing Phil—he has no way to know that Phil is dead, no way to know that Clint would rather see Phil’s face than anything else in the whole world—but neither is it fair for Calvin to root around in people's brain and steal familiar faces to populate his stupid fantasy factories.

“I’m never going to _stop_ doing that.”

Clint had pasted one of the guards pretty hard across the mouth before Calvin had whisked him out of reality and deposited him at the beach, and even here Clint can feel the deep throb across his knuckles, cut by the guard’s teeth. Hopefully right now those teeth are littered across the floor alongside Clint’s sleeping body.

“They’ll make you stop. They’ll _make_ you stop fighting.” There’s a thread of fear in his voice that Clint had never heard come from the real Phil Coulson. “They’re gonna hurt you so bad.”

“Yeah,” Clint sighs. "That kind of goes without saying.”

It's all hurtling toward some sort of inevitable conclusion; Clint’s eyes in a petri dish instead of in his head, Captain America dead on a table somewhere. 

“It can be so nice _here_ ,” Not-Phil says, tapping his forehead, and this time the voice sounds just right, that unique mix of fond exasperation. “So I don’t know why you have to keep fighting and make everything unnecessarily hard. Aren’t things hard enough?”

“And _I_ don’t know why you don’t help us get out of here. You know who Steve is. You know what he and I can do; you’ve seen it. Here.” Clint leans forward and copies the tapping gesture on Not-Phil's forehead, resisting the urge to do it too hard, smiling ruefully when Not-Phil flinches backward. "I can give you a refresher if you want to watch any of our greatest hits. I'll show you the good stuff; nothing too gory."

“It won’t work." And Not-Phil sounds certain but he doesn't _look_ certain, a little doubtful line appearing between his eyebrows. "They’ve got the walls fixed so that what I can do in here doesn’t work out there.”

“That’s okay, because what I can do works _everywhere_. Give me one guard, just one, and I'll get you out.” Clint edges closer, until they're touching, the length of his arm pressing against the Mindfucker's, getting sand all over Not-Phil's nice suit. “There's a whole world, a real world, out there waiting for you. People to talk to, things to see."

The idea isn't as enticing as it would be to anyone else; Calvin’s been alone far too long to be drawn in by the promise of social interaction. Clint, however, has an even better lure. "And, Calvin, there are _shows_. You get out of here and you can live the rest of your life watching as much TV as you ever wanted. You’ll get so many ideas, so many new big beautiful dreams to share. All the things you like. 'Little House on the Prairie' kind of stuff. Family friendly content. Medical shows and courtroom shows and—”

“Shows about prison breaks?” Not-Phil interrupts, and it’s a weak joke, but he’s smiling, looking a little more interested, a little hopeful. “Are there even shows about—”

*

Then Clint blinks awake, and he’s not in the cell.

He’s in the operating theater, and he’s strapped down.

 _They’re gonna hurt you so bad_ , Clint thinks.

And they do.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was turning out to be the longest chapter ever, so I've divided it into two parts. That also gives me a chance to procrastinate a bit more--a Galaga themed art project has been emitting a siren's call that I am powerless to resist.

*

He should be happy. He should be thrilled, delirious with relief, brimming with gratitude. No matter that it’s the homestead again, the low-rent Little House on the Prairie fucking _nightmare_ , the most powerful attack in what feels like a multifaceted, long term plan to bore Clint Barton to death; he should be happy.

He knows nothing about farming, but that doesn't matter in the slightest; he can follow the horse and use the plow to spell out giant words in the soil and tiny, perfect plants will invariably pop up in neat rows. All that matters is that he carry out his role in the idyllic farm scenario that Calvin has envisioned, going out every day and replanting the crops he’d planted the day before, and the day before that, and the day before _that_. The silent, grinding repetition of the farm is akin to driving nails directly into Clint’s soul, but he should be happy today, because he can _see_. He should be happy, he should be overjoyed, and he should be drinking in every goddamned color that a Mindfucker paints with—green plants, brown earth, yellow sun—because when this dream ends Clint likely won’t be seeing anything _._

The world will almost certainly be dark when he opens his eyes again, in the real world. But it's not dark here.

“Let’s go,” Clint tells the boys.

There’s only three of them today. The number of kids keeps changing—sometimes there are as many as seven milling around, sometimes as few as four—appearing and disappearing as the situation demands, an inconsistent ratio of sons and daughters. Clint's pale, expressionless wife had been called Emily at first, but her name changed to Emma at some unspecified point, probably because Calvin liked the sound of it better. She stands waving from the doorway as Clint and the boys head toward the fields, her hand moving back and forth mechanically like a human metronome. _Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._ Clint throws her a hasty wave in return. 

His farm family is never more than this, never more than silent, shadowy figures with empty doll eyes, because this world isn’t meant for Clint. Calvin has never made an appearance; he’s too busy off fucking around with Steve, the star of this particular shitshow. Steve lives as the town minister in a clapboard house and has a wife with fertility problems that will undoubtedly be miraculously resolved, just when things seem most fraught. Until then, the heartache and drama of the whole thing has kept Calvin endlessly entertained and occupied.

There’s none of that excitement left over for Clint, stuck here on the sidelines, exiled away from the main story. The homestead fields go on forever, like that endless beach, and usually Clint just walks in one direction until he gets bored and starts working. Today he doesn’t make it more than few hundred feet, the boys following him like a silent line of towheaded ducklings, before he stops. It’s not a conscious decision to quit walking, he just _stops_. Folds down to the ground and stays there. 

The horse stands motionlessly beside its dropped lead while the boys form a mindless orbit around Clint, unable to cease carrying out the chores they exist only to do. He's close enough that the farmhouse is in full view and Emma is still standing in the doorway, stuck on repeat, her hand tick-tocking back and forth.

Clint leans back on his elbows, and even though his head rolls oddly on his shoulders, hanging back too far, stuck looking mostly at the sky, it’s fine. He's out of breath and oddly shaky, simultaneously too hot and cold, but he certainly isn’t laying on the ground in exhaustion and defeat. No, this is a choice. This is _reclining_ , this is _resting_ , this is refusing to work like he’s supposed to, refusing to play along with Calvin’s stupid fantasies. His eyes want to slide closed, but he keeps them open, forces his head back down again, determined to take everything in, determined not to lose the colors. He can't lose them yet. Not when everything is going to be so dark later.

Bright green plants are already sprouting around him, an inch tall at least, and Clint digs his fingers into the soil and tosses a handful at them. “You’re such a lazy Mindfucker, Calvin. The absolute fucking _worst_.” 

The boys keep walking in their circle. Emma keeps waving. Clint keeps sitting, panting, struggling to remain semi-upright.

Maybe out there, in the real world, his body is giving out. Maybe this is what dying feels like.

*

“Barton.”

Calvin must be asleep, because Cap’s voice is pitched low, quiet, meant not to startle.

Clint stirs enough to let Steve know that he’s heard, that he’s rousing. The movement also awakens the impulse to tear the bandage away from his eyes—both to free himself of the restrictive pressure and to discover what they’ve done to him, determine how bad it really is. He curls his hands into fists instead and drives them into his thighs, hard enough to bruise. No touching allowed. The bandages have to stay put. This place is a cesspool of germs and the last thing Clint needs is a staph infection exploding out of both eye sockets.

“Barton.” Louder this time, with a commanding note that could penetrate any degree of unconsciousness. “Can you hear me? Barton. Wake up.”

Clint just needs another minute to center himself, and then he can go back to feeding Steve the bullshit he needs—that everything is fine, that Clint has suffered far worse than this. That he can handle _more_ if necessary, that he’ll somehow be raring to go when their escape begins and the fighting finally starts. He’ll say all those things in a minute. Just one more—

“Barton. Come on, wake up _._ ”

“Christ, Steve, I _am_ awake.”

It doesn’t come out quite as forcefully as he intends, more weary than ill-tempered. Clint rolls to his side and pushes up slightly, pausing at the way the pressure on his eyes increases when his head hangs briefly. The pain has seeped into his whole body, into his joints and bones, and picking himself off this cement floor is going to be an exercise in agony, but Steve’s relieved intake of breath is motivation enough to keep going. Clint makes it to a seated position on his knees, and there he fully intends to remain, panting slightly, head swimming from the sudden change in position.

“Come here.”

It’s another order thinly veiled as a request, and Clint knows that tone. Steve wants to look him over, _n_ _eeds_ to look him over, and that tone means that Steve’s not going to stop insisting until Clint complies. Later Steve will feel guilty, but right now he wants to look his teammate over and doesn’t give a good goddamn how hard it is for Clint to drag himself there as long as it happens.

“ _Clint_. Come here.”

Clint sighs and gets a foot under himself, reaches down to push against the ground. Both hands land in something wet—he tells himself not to think about it, not to wonder what it is—before he finally grasps a thread of equilibrium and clings to it for all he’s worth, making it to his feet at last. He’s sightless and dangerously unsteady and it’s stupid to attempt to walk like this, but he's not going to crawl over to Captain America on his fucking knees.

The fingertips of his outstretched hand brush the cold bars and Steve’s hand suddenly winds through the fabric of Clint’s shirt and pulls him gently forward the rest of the way. Pulls him to the bars and against the bars, and then some more, as if Steve fully intends to squeeze the archer right through the gap and into the same cell.

“There. You’re okay. You are, aren’t you? You’re still okay.” Steve’s talking to himself more than anything, running one big hand over Clint’s forehead and through his hair. “What did they do? Was it bad?”

Clint will never recount, under any circumstances, the way his body wrenched itself into painful contortions against its bonds. The way he simultaneously attempted to keep still, desperate not to move and make things worse. How it felt when those doctors were peeling his eyes apart layer by layer, how he finally went ahead and let himself scream because Steve's cell was far enough away that he wouldn't hear. Clint will never confide any of those things to a well meaning shrink, will never write them in a SHIELD report or whisper them to Natasha. So he’ll _certainly_ never tell them to Captain America, especially not now, when it will do no good at all.

“Nah. It was just more of the same.” Then Clint clears his throat and amends, “A lot _more_ of more of the same” because a dash of honesty always makes a lie more believable.

Steve traces lightly around the edge of the bandage around Clint’s eyes. “I really ought to—Would you mind if I—"

He doesn't wait for an answer, already fumbling for the end of the gauze before Clint reaches up to push his hand away—Steve may know a lot about field medicine but he knows nothing about eye trauma, and there have been enough fingers fumbling near Clint's eyes already. “Steve. Calvin’s asleep.”

It’s the only time he’s vulnerable. The only time he can’t send them to Lalaland before they take two steps in his direction.

“Shhh, try not to talk.” Steve’s voice is soothing, but once again there’s that commanding note laced behind it. A thread of warning.

“He’s asleep and now’s the perfect time. Please. Please do it.”

The hand drifts back to Clint’s forehead, Steve checking first with the palm of his hand and then with the back of his fingers, as if maybe he'll feel a difference. “God, you’re absolutely burning up. Here, let’s sit you back down. You should be sleeping; you need to rest.”

Clint huffs a tired laugh because he _had_ been sitting down, had even been sleeping, and Steve was the one that insisted he get up and drag himself over here. But instead of sliding down to the floor as ordered, as he _wants_ to, Clint stays standing. It doesn’t matter that he has to grip both of Steve’s wrists in order to stay up. He’s up. That’s all that matters. He’s standing.

“Steve. _Steve_. You have to kill Calvin.”

“You’re hurt and sick. You don’t know what you’re saying.” This time it’s Steve that tries to push Clint’s hands away and Clint that refuses to be dislodged.

“I know you don’t want to and I know it feels wrong, but you have _got_ to kill that Mindfucker. Now, while he’s asleep. While we’re still strong enough to have a chance to make it out of here.”

“He’s a prisoner, too,” Steve insists. The old argument, the same endless refrain. “He’s been horribly mistreated. They kidnapped him, tortured him. Locked him up and told him—”

“Then let _me_ do it.” Clint walks his fingers up Steve’s arm and up toward his neck, feeling the pulse under his skin. A rapid heartbeat, far too fast for Steve. “This would be close enough. Bring him over to me, close just like this, and _I'll_ do it.”

His other hand joins the first, quickly, before Steve can pull away, because Clint may be weak and he may be blind but he’s still fast. His hands are on either side of Steve’s neck in an instant—one sharp movement and Steve Roger’s life would be over, super serum be damned—but Clint keeps his touch light. Nothing more than a token, barely-there weight, carefully non-threatening. 

“See? It would be so easy. So quick. And I wouldn’t let him suffer, I promise.”

It's the truth. There’s no honor in killing a fellow prisoner, a ruined person, a tortured man—but the choice between sparing the life of a mindfucker Clint just met and saving the life of a friend is an easy one. If Clint had been the one sharing the cell with Calvin instead of Steve, he would have snapped the man's neck the instant he realized what he was, what he was capable of doing.

“You wouldn’t do that. No. You don't know what you're saying." Steve pries the hands carefully from his neck and this time Clint lets them be moved. “Calvin is innocent. Just a regular person who they’ve hurt, just like us. I can get through to him; I just need a little more time. We’ll be in a much stronger position getting out of here if we have his help.”

Clint’s suddenly glad for the bandages, glad that he can’t see Steve, glad that he isn’t forced to watch the dichotomy of a man fantasizing about _stronger positions_ while dying in a prison cell. Steve’s voice sounds thin. Stretched. His voice sounds like Clint’s eyes feel. Steve’s fading fast, but he’s willing to die because he’s unwilling to hurt someone else.

*

“White male, early forties. Presents with fever, fatigue, and highly combative behavior.”

Clint doesn’t bother to suppress an eyeroll at the words, even though it hurts. In fact, he does it again, because it's worth every ounce of agony to see the pursed expression on Calvin's borrowed face.

It’s a bit of a departure from the usual medical scenario; instead of casting Steve or Clint as the lead doctor, the Mindfucker is playing the part himself, once again using Phil Coulson as a mask. Otherwise it’s the same old routine—the brash (but brilliant) lead doctor solves the medical mystery of the week while followed around by a group of naïve (but brilliant) medical students; young upstart cubs just waiting to be schooled by the older, superior lion. The Avengers team has been cast in the role of the students and Clint would laugh at the bright, overeager expressions so out of place on Natasha’s and Tony’s faces if he had the energy. If he weren’t so damned tired.

“All tests point to systemic infection,” Calvin barks. He’s strong here; this is his element, his world, where he's always right and always in charge. 

“Don’t worry,” Clint stage whispers to the Bruce Banner student lookalike, who startles and blinks rapidly back. “I won't die. I’ll be miraculously cured ten minutes before the episode ends, just you wait and see. It’ll turn out to be something super exotic that no one’s ever heard of. Well, that or lupus.”

Calvin pretends to ignore him, but Clint had made a painstaking, multi-year study of everything about Phil Coulson’s face, and it’s impossible for him to miss the way the stolen eyes narrow minutely. “Patient has been largely unresponsive to standard treatment and is deteriorating rapidly."

“In fact, does anyone happen to have a book of rare diseases handy? You might as well start there and save yourself a shit-ton of time.”

"Despite our best efforts, prognosis is—”

“Hopefully all you kids will learn valuable life lessons from my suffering,” Clint adds grandly, then gestures toward the heartrate monitor standing sentry next to his bed, beeping steadily away. “I’ll even give you a freebie—hospitals don’t hook these up to everyone. They only use them on people that need their hearts, you know, _monitored_. If you’re going for realism—and I know you are—replace this with an IV that pinches and a blood pressure cuff that goes off every ten goddamned minutes."

"Prognosis is—"

"And don't forget one of the oxygen finger clip thingies!” Clint interrupts, waving his hand obnoxiously in front of Fake Phil's face, grinning as it’s batted away. “Doctors just _love_ to put those finger clip thingies on people. Pass ‘em out like party favors!”

He really shouldn’t be antagonizing Calvin. He should be working him over nonstop, hitting him from all angles and in all worlds, real and otherwise. Weaving a tale about how great life could be and about a place at SHIELD, where his talents could be used to better the world. It’s a well-worn story that has worked on countless people over countless years, and Clint Barton spins that fairytale as well as anyone, and better than most, because Calvin isn’t the only mindfucker locked up here, not by a long shot. Clint’s always been able to see the best way to worm his way into people and then tear right out again, taking out as many pieces as he wants along the way.

He should be doing those things, doing all of them right and talking his way out of here, but he doesn't. He can't. He's too tired. So damned tired.

Calvin frowns down with his Phil Coulson face and then reaches down through the neck of the hospital gown, tearing the electrodes from Clint’s chest. The steady _blip blip blip_ of the heart monitor is replaced by a high-pitched, screeching _eeeeeee_ before Calvin punches it off. He fixes his eyes on Clint's, and this time there's something akin to pity in them.

“Prognosis is poor.”


	3. Chapter 3

*

He awakens, or half awakens, to the real world and snippets of conversation.

Steve’s voice is thin and distressed but somehow still louder than all the others. “You’re wrong,” he insists, his bare feet slapping against the cement floor as he paces anxiously back and forth. “ _Wrong_. Clint. Wake up. Get up!"

Someone—no, several someones—are standing over Clint; he can feel their shins brushing against his shoulders and the toes of their shoes digging into his side. _Roll him over_ , one says while another crabs back _I am_ and another says _God, shut up—_ probably referring to Steve, who’s still alternating between shouting at them and shouting for Clint, unsure of whose attention he wants more. Most of the voices aren’t familiar at all, but Clint recognizes the one that says _Let me through_ , the one that makes all the others fall silent. It’s the lead doctor, and that’s pretty damned concerning. The scientists never come back here.

Clint can’t stop whatever they plan to do. Can’t fight. The cold from the cement floor has seeped into his bones and his limbs weigh a hundred pounds each, gravity tethering him to the floor in four perfect points of contact. He can’t even protest; his vocal cords as uninterested in cooperating as the rest of him.

 _Mom. Barney. Phil. Natasha_.

Clint flips through the names like a deck of cards—he’s cried out for all of them at one time or another—trying to figure out the one who’s going to come and save him this time. Whenever Clint can’t save himself his next impulse has always been to select a person to threaten the monster with.

_My mother will come looking._

_My brother will stop you._

_My handler will find me._

_My Natasha will kill you._

None of those people are around now to help him; most of them are dead. Only Steve is here, and he’s trapped on the other side of iron bars.

Fingers push at Clint’s neck, rooting for a pulse. The doctor is chewing gum—Big Red, judging by the overwhelming cinnamon exhalations—and his jaw clicks softly every time his teeth come together, his chewing as methodical and measured as everything else he does. He’s touching, touching too much, just like Steve had, hands everywhere, but when the doctor’s fingers dance near the bandage around his eyes Clint finally finds the strength to grab at one meaty wrist.

“Get off.”

He’s got no volume and no vowels—the words come out as all hissed consonants, but the doctor seems to understand anyway, sighing out a giant waft of Big Red air into Clint’s face. He plucks the hand from his wrist with embarrassing ease, then pats it gently before draping it back over Clint’s stomach.

“Well,” the doctor says, and it’s the voice of conclusion, of decision, of proclamation. “Well.” It’s also the voice of dismissal as he stands, brushing his hands against his pants in a brisk _shh shh shh_ of sound, dusting away at every bit of fabric that came in contact with Clint. “Calvin’s right, as usual.”

Steve immediately insists, “He isn’t. He _isn’t_.”

There isn’t any time to wonder what the hell they’re talking before the real world vanishes.

*

It almost sounds like a joke: playing football with the Football Family. Clint and the two kids are roughhousing in their perfectly manicured and spacious backyard while Georgia watches and laughs. Little Maggie really shouldn’t be playing contact sports—they’ve already spent too much money perfecting her teeth to risk them—but Clint lets her anyway, too enchanted by a miniature giggling Natasha clone to deny her anything. The boy, the fake son, looks like a combination of teenaged Barney and Clint, but confident and happy in a way they never were—a Barton boy that’s finally thriving, and right now Clint doesn’t care that none of this is real, because it’s all such an improbable and welcome sight.

And he feels so goddamned _good_.

Strong, with none of the pain and fatigue from the outside world creeping into this inner one. Clint should wonder how Calvin is suddenly managing that—lately all Clint’s been able to do in the dreamworlds is lay around like a useless potato—but instead he pushes the thought quickly away. He doesn't care; it doesn’t matter how Calvin is doing it, because Clint can run here. He can do anything. He can see again.

It’s the best day ever and that night Clint crawls into bed with Georgia and goes to sleep happily, a dream within a dream.

*

He’s a little surprised to wake up in the same place, to another day with the Football Family, then again the next day, and the next.

It just keeps going, the farce lasting much longer than usual, but at first Clint thinks that it’s just another of the Mindfucker’s games, the same old whirlwind, but such an easy, comfortable one that Clint plays along gamely enough, the way Steve has always wanted him to. This dream is overly long, sure, but soon enough one of the guards in the real world will come with dinner and wake them all up. Or Calvin will eventually get bored and move them along to something else, the way he always has before.

It will end, Clint keeps thinking. It will end soon enough.

*

But it doesn’t.

Days turn to weeks and no part of it is fun anymore, and it doesn’t matter that he can run and how great he feels it isn’t a relief in any sense of the word, because Clint can’t find the seams. He can’t see the cracks in the world where Calvin got lazy and stopped building—mistakes like the crops growing too fast, electronics that work while unplugged, court procedures that mean nothing. Clint can’t spot the telltale fraying thread of reality and Georgia and the kids are more animated, more _solid_ than they ever were before. They’re beginning to feel disconcertingly like real people while the Mindfucker doesn’t appear to be anywhere.

*

Clint is staring at the stupid seashell pattern on the ceiling while Georgia flits around their bedroom, blathering on about how she grew too many cucumbers in the garden last year and everyone got tired of them, how maybe this year she’ll plant cherry tomatoes, that maybe she’ll plant some flowers, too, does Clint think they need to fertilize the soil, and blah and blah and fucking _blah_. Clint is only half listening, horrified and amazed for such endless banality to pour from Natasha Romanov’s mouth, and it isn’t until she suggests that Clint build some raised garden beds that it really hits him—Georgia's planning for the spring, months away, a spring that will include him. In four months’ time Clint will still be here and he’ll be making those garden beds, because this dream isn't ever going to end.

Maybe something has gone wrong in the real world. Maybe Calvin has cracked and gone insane and can’t pull them back out. Or maybe he’s just fine and doing this on purpose—a vindictive Mindfucker happily paying Clint back for every eyeroll and snarky comment, enjoying the rare opportunity to hurt someone the way he himself has been hurt. But whatever the reason, this dream is going to last forever, or at least it will be forever for Clint, and it will go on so long and be so immersive that the real world will start to feel like the dream. Growing up in a circus, being a spy, becoming a superhero—those things will sound ridiculous when stacked against the daily drudgery of work and family life. It will become absurd to believe that Clint ever worked on a flying aircraft carrier, that his best friend was killed by an alien demi-God, that arc reactors and AI butlers are things that can actually exist. This will last forever, so long that Clint will have no recourse but to embrace it, to let some Mindfucker’s dreams replace his own.

“No,” Clint says, and Georgia is startled out of her gardening monologue, a look of confusion playing across her features. “I’m not staying here.”

“Not sleepy, hon? You shouldn’t have had that extra cup of coffee. You _know_ how that—"

“I’m not staying here _._ ” Clint throws his hand up vaguely, indicating the room, the house, the world. “I want out, Calvin. You fucker. _Mind_ fucker.”

If Clint can’t find the seams in the world then he’ll create some of his own—with his fingernails, with his teeth, with every piece left of him that’s able to fight. Clint stares at Georgia, who capers about wearing his dearest friend’s face, but isn’t Natasha, not at all, and knows he’ll have to kill her. He’ll kill Georgia and then the kids—and _God_ , he doesn’t want to do the kids, even if they’re fake kids, he’s always hated any part of violence that includes kids on any level. But he’ll kill them if that’s what it takes, because Calvin, lover of all G-rated, family friendly content won’t be able to tolerate _that_.

Maybe Calvin recognizes something in Clint’s expression, or maybe he just plucks the thought from his brain, the way he’s taken everything else. In the end it doesn’t matter, because it’s enough. It’s finally enough.

“All right. We need to talk.”

*

Then it isn’t Georgia and finally not Phil Coulson, but Calvin himself. An idealized Calvin, one with a strong voice instead of the broken, papery rasp that is his reality, with full cheeks and dark curls instead of harshly shorn hair and skeleton face. It’s a Calvin that Clint has never met, the Calvin that came before this hellhole—just a typical American Mindfucker that wanted to be left alone to bingewatch courtroom dramas and wholesome TV shows in peace.

“You just can’t stop yourself, can you? You can’t just go along and let something be nice.”

The Football Family is gone and the two of them are suddenly standing on that endless beach. And now that the deep dream is over the pain comes barreling back, taking Clint by surprise; it hadn’t been long that Calvin had made it disappear, just a few weeks, but Clint had forgotten how bad it was, how engulfing. Now he falls to his knees and braces himself against the sand, riding out the waves, trying to get a hold on it. He can bear _anything_ if he’s in the right headspace, if he’s ready for it. He just needs a minute first. Just a minute.

“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Calvin continues indignantly, pacing in irritation, his footsteps kicking up small puffs of sand. “The most contrary person on the entire planet. It’s like you don’t even _want_ to be happy. Like you _want_ to live in a world of crap!”

“I do,” Clint gasps as soon as his breath returns. When he forces his face up toward Calvin the sun behind him blinds Clint’s screaming eyes even further, but it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care. “I do if it’s the _real_ one.”

“Ridiculous. You’re ridiculous,” Calvin sputters, alternately shaking his head at Clint or out toward the ocean. “I’m trying to do the right thing and you just keep—"

“Oh, shut up, you manip—” Clint’s voice catches on the word, but he’s almost got a handle on the pain now, forcing it into confines that he can control. “You. You manipulative _shitstick_ ,” he forces out finally, the corners of his own mouth lifting as Calvin’s turn down. “I’m the last person on earth you wanna argue morality with.”

“You always complain, say I do everything wrong. And I do miss the little things sometimes—I _know_ that, I do—but I showed you, didn’t I? Showed you how I can do it, and you saw, saw how I can make _all_ of it right when I concentrate hard enough. The others were all grateful. They let it happen, let themselves enjoy it.”

Clint and Steve always suspected that there’d been other prisoners before them and would be more afterward; Calvin and the guards were always too much in sync to be anything but practiced. And even though he wants to keep sitting there so much, so goddamned much, Clint forces himself to stand, this time shielding his eyes against the sun, needing to look the Mindfucker in the face.

“Yeah, well, I’m a whole different thing. I’m the one who’s never going to play along. Not _ever_.”

“But you could. You could stop complaining.” Calvin’s face goes solemn. “You could stop pushing. You could go along and let yourself enjoy it, and let it be nice at the end.”

“At the end.” Clint doesn’t bother making it a question.

“You’re dying. I’m in your cell with you right now, holding your hand. You aren’t alone.” Clint can feel it suddenly, a gently reassuring pressure against his palm, both here and somewhere else, somewhere real. “The scientists don’t care but they aren’t _heartless_. It’s the deal we made—I keep people calm while the doctors do their tests, and then I get to take care of things at the end. And I’m so good. I make it so _nice_.”

“Nice,” Clint echoes. Calvin’s idealized, fuller face has dimples when he smiles, goddamned _dimples_ , and Clint suddenly can’t take his eyes off them.

“I’ll take care of Steve, too, when his time comes. He likes the homestead the best. He’ll live a big long life there; his wife will have a baby and their lives will be good. Years will go by and one day he’ll die an old man—it can feel like a hundred years there when it’s really just a moment, while I’m holding his hand in the real world.”

“Jesus,” Clint breathes. “Jesus.”

“The red haired woman has so many different faces and voices in your head; she’s hard to get right, but I’ve gotten close. You’ve already seen where you’ll live, and you already know you can be happy there.”

The Football Family.

It all makes sense suddenly—Calvin rooting around in his brain, feeling for Natasha and Phil and the Avengers and weaving them into the dreams, gauging the reactions to them, adjusting, changing. Sometimes Calvin had just been entertaining himself with the medical and legal dramas he loved so much, but the other dreams had been all about Steve and Clint. Steve’s enjoyment of a simple life, surrounded by nature and family and fruits from hard, honest labor. Clint’s wish for a normal family and life, an idle fantasy reserved for long flights and boring missions, imagining the what-ifs— _if_ he’d had a child, _if_ he’d had a normal job. Something Clint had kept secret even from Natasha, embarrassed for his go-to daydream to be comprised of such mundane events.

“I’m dying,” Clint repeats, rolling the words around in his mouth, the idea around in his head. “I’m dying.”

It doesn’t scare him as much as it probably should. Maybe because he doesn’t believe it. It doesn’t _feel_ like his time. Clint has more than a passing acquaintance with death and found himself on the receiving end a few times, even delivering some heartfelt goodbyes and declarations of love that Calvin, lover of all angsty theatrics, would swoon over.

He’s certainly enjoying _this_ , taking Clint’s hand tenderly between both of his. Calvin the benevolent. Calvin the hero. “Yes. And I can make it not hurt, if you’ll just _let_ me.”

It’s not true—he’s not dying, he isn’t, he _isn’t_ —but Clint still knows a decent offer when he hears one. He’s always known he was fated for a premature and horrible death, so the idea of a long quiet life in suburbia alongside a faux-Natasha is a far sweeter swan song than Clint Barton could ever really hope to ask for. So it’s a good offer, and he’s tempted for the span of a moment, because parts of that dream had been nice, had been _wonderful_ , even. But even the best dream becomes a hell when there’s no way out of it, and Clint will always choose to be blind and bleeding in the real world instead of forced to live someone else’s life.

“I can’t.” He pulls his hand out from between Calvin’s. “I _won’t_.”

“My way is so much better,” Calvin tries again, but Clint’s pain is already doubling, tripling, and growing unbearable as beach fades and the real world replaces it. “It’s so much _nicer_.”

“Yeah,” Clint sighs, “it probably is.”

*

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Steve says, and if Clint didn’t already know things were bad, that word alone would seal the deal. Steve’s voice sounds raw and sick, but also righteously pissed. That’s good. They’ll need a little extra of that Captain America verve to balance out the fact that Hawkeye doesn’t have much. “You said he was dying. You said you’d...” Steve’s anger is palpable, and angry is even better than pissed. “You _said_.”

“He didn’t want me to.” Calvin’s voice is back to its splintered rasp. He is indeed holding Clint’s hand; holding Clint’s entire upper body, in fact, cradled in his lap. “I tried, but he said no.”

“Bring him to me.”

And there it is, the Captain America voice, the one that Steve does so well. The voice of the leader that wants his teammate and won’t be denied, one that even Calvin, who never was a soldier, is helpless to resist.

Of course he has a hard time with it; Calvin is scrawny and weak from years in this place, and mental exertion is the only kind he’s used to. Even if he were so inclined Clint isn’t strong enough to make getting over to Steve any easier—instead he feels every bone from Calvin’s knobby knees and shoulders as his body is pushed and nudged, every part of Clint not covered in clothing rubbing and dragging painfully against the cement. It feels like half his skin is scraped away on this fucking floor, but Calvin’s slowly moving him closer, closer to Steve. And Clint doesn’t need eyes to know that Steve is standing and waiting at the bars of their adjoining cells, his spine straight and his expression brave, serious, and oh-so-all-American.

“ _Bring_ him to me,” Steve orders again, but there’s that anger again, a less familiar note beneath that Captain America voice. “ _Closer_ , Calvin. Bring him here.”

There’s one last painful push before a hand floats through the gap in the bars. Questing fingertips brushing Clint’s shoulder and then grip the fabric of his shirt as Steve drags Clint to the bars, taking Calvin along for the ride, all of them wrapped up together. They’re all so close that Clint can feel the heat from Steve’s fever and the anger that’s pouring from him in waves, and he realizes that Steve’s going to do it at last. He’s finally going to snap this Mindfucker’s goddamned neck, because in the end Steve will also choose his team first, and he’s willing to tear away at his own conscience in service of a friend.

But there’s no need for that. It’s to spare Steve and because Clint’s not dying, not really—he’s down, sure, but he’s not out, not yet—that he’s able to capitalize on the rare proximity and Calvin’s distraction. It will be as easy as he’d promised; life is such a fragile thing that it’s not terribly hard to snuff out, to kill someone is but the work of a moment and Clint’s never enjoyed it, he’s always hated it, but he’s also never shied away from doing what needs to be done.

But then he thinks of Steve insisting _He’s a prisoner too_.

And of Calvin’s _I’m holding your hand_ and _you aren’t alone._

And of Georgia and homesteads, of medical dramas and idealized Barton boys, and Clint’s hands abandon their journey to Calvin’s neck and travel instead to his elbow and forearm, deftly rearranging the bones there with a tidy _snap snap snap_ , everything accomplished in an economy of motion and effort. Clint’s arms fall back down against his chest while Calvin collapses in a heap on top of him, screaming in his strange, broken voice, large rises followed by dramatic falls in volume, and all of it directly in Clint’s face.

Steve wanted Calvin alive. He’d pitied him, and Clint had too, a little. Calvin won’t die of this injury, but neither will he be painting any of his pretty pictures now. No risk of him whisking them away to his personal playgrounds, no risk of him thinking of anything at _all_ but how much he hurts.

Steve reaches through the bars enough to shove Calvin away—the Mindfucker’s howls climb in pitch as he tumbles onto his broken arm—and Clint takes a loud, gasping breath of relief at the release of pressure on his chest.

“Hey,” Steve is saying gently, too gently, only to replace it with a louder, dismayed, “Hey!” when Clint reaches up to tear the bandage away from his eyes. “No no no, don’t _do_ that!”’

Clint’s fingers are stiff and uncoordinated and maybe he just scratches pathetically at the gauze instead of ripping it dramatically, but the bandage comes off and when it does—God, thank _God_ —he can see. Everything is blurry and dark and the pain is overwhelming but his eyes _work_. He sees cell bars and a writhing, shrieking shape that is Calvin, and a larger, hulking one that is Steve. Close enough that Clint can just about make out his expression, stern and disappointed and so very Captain America-y.

“Sorry.”

Clint isn’t sorry, not at all. He’s smiling, maybe. It’s hard to tell. He’d reach up to feel his face to know one way or another, but this time he can't move, he has nothing left, pooled to a liquid, living heap on the floor. He took care of the hard part. Steve can take care of the rest.

*

**EPILOGUE**

Steve choked out the guard that came to investigate Calvin’s ceaseless screams—he hadn’t liked that but couldn’t exactly complain because, again, no one was dead—and then escape was as easy as plucking a cell phone out of the man’s pocket and calling Tony. No need, in the end, to grab a gun and take on the whole facility; Steve and Clint spent the rest of their escape listening to Calvin wail and waiting for the calvary to arrive. And as shitty as both of them felt, that was probably for the best.

Once in the arms of SHIELD Medical, Steve recovers completely over the course of a day—the lucky enhanced bastard—while Clint is stashed in the burn unit because the risk of infection is so high. His eyes are gooped with medicine and wrapped too tightly, the bed has a mattress made of cement and he’s tucked under the world’s worst blanket—every piece of skin it covers is roasting while every bit that sticks out is ice fucking cold.

But none of that matters, all of it is great at first, because they’re _home_. Natasha is a constant presence while Tony and Bruce skip in and out frequently, bringing jokes and distraction and junk food that the nurses confiscate immediately. A few days later Thor suddenly makes an appearance, arriving dramatically from God knows where, declaring that everyone should go home and rest. Surprisingly enough, the others comply, and Thor spends all night holding Clint’s hand, which is extremely weird but so well intended that Clint doesn’t bother shaking him off. He falls asleep during Thor’s winding Asgardian tale about love, friendship, and war and when he wakes up again hours later Thor is still there, still telling it.

And once Steve feels better and decides that Clint isn’t going to die he returns to fighting injustice full time—or what he _perceives_ as injustice anyway. When informed that something in the facility walls had kept Calvin’s wiles contained SHIELD had immediately torn a bunch of them out and built a brand new cell, then stashed Calvin in it until they figure out what the hell to do with him. Steve spends all his time railing to anyone who will listen that Calvin was a mistreated prisoner, that he isn’t evil, that it isn’t right that he’s locked up right alongside his former captors. Captain America is on a personal crusade—he’s indignant and he’s righteously mad, and he doesn’t approve at all of how SHIELD is treating their new Mindfucker, not one little bit.

Clint feels pretty great about it.

*

But it’s the only thing that feels good when the doubt starts to creep in.

Everything feels wrapped up too neatly. Clint and Steve have lived to fight another day; they made it through a lengthy imprisonment and will have no lasting effects. Normally Natasha’s presence would be reassuring, but Calvin got in too deep and captured her too well—now Clint can’t let himself believe that she’s truly _his_ Natasha. He can’t be certain that Calvin doesn’t have them still, that he isn’t dragging Clint’s dying mind through an Avengers version of a happy ending, because that’s the ultimate problem when it comes to Mindfuckers—one never really knows when they’re finished pulling at the threads that people are made of.

Bruce has stayed behind to wait with Clint, who tracks the sound of his footfalls as he fretfully pacing the confines of the hospital room and the minute clatter of objects as Bruce picks them up and sets them down again. The soft _swish swish_ as he cleans his glasses repeatedly with the hem of his shirt the way his breath catches occasionally, like he intends to say something before thinking better of it.

Clint just waits.

He doesn’t know how’ll they do it, but just like Steve back in those cells, Clint doesn’t give a fuck _how_ they’ll smuggle a bow past the SHIELD nurses—who have eyes like hawks and a longstanding zero tolerance policy for Barton-related bullshit—all that matters is that it arrives.

Bruce fidgets and Clint waits and finally finally _finally_ the door opens with a weak, pneumatic sound, Bruce’s sigh of relief confirming that it’s not medical staff but Nat and Tony at last. Tony is complaining loudly about the continued need to wear a mask and gown and gloves, insisting that he feels like a walking prophylactic, but his grousing is all for show, to keep the nurses’ eyes rolling in irritation instead of focusing on this room, where Natasha sweeps in silently and presses something compact and cool into Clint’s waiting hands.

Archery is Clint Barton’s most beloved thing and yet there’d never been one bow in even that last, most perfect of dreams because while Calvin could pick any image or memory out of Clint’s head he could never hope to capture that feeling of drawing the bow, could never create something he didn’t know anything about. All his best gear is kept at Avengers Tower these days, but there are a few pieces still here in the armory, and Clint recognizes this collapsible bow from the old Strike Team Delta days, a weapon carried in countless Barton backpacks and Coulson briefcases, a perfect size for clandestine maneuvers like this one.

Clint opens the bow in one practiced motion—the IV and tape pull uncomfortably at the back of his hand and he probably looks pathetic. No, he probably looks ri-goddamned-diculous, clad in hospital gown and his head covered in bandages, but it doesn’t matter. Only Nat and Tony and Bruce are here to see and they’ll never bring it up later to tease; they’re just as anxious for a miracle cure as Clint is.

Every muscle burns and Clint’s eyes throb along with his heartbeat, but he pulls to a full draw and stops, caught in indecision until Tony stage whispers, “He still points his stupid elbow way up; _that_ hasn’t changed” and the spell is broken. Clint laughs in a sudden release of tension, his arms relaxing in the same moment, hands suddenly pressing over his, easing the drawstring back to rest.

It’s real. The bow is real. Nat and Tony and Bruce are real and Calvin is locked away somewhere, with Captain America as his only champion. Everything’s okay again. It’s all okay. It’s okay to let go when the bow is plucked quickly from his grasp and okay not to wonder whose hand replaces it. Okay not to worry what dreams will come when he falls asleep, because whether they’re good or terrible or simply weird they’ll be _his_.

“Hawkeye, go to sleep,” Natasha says.

And Clint does.


End file.
